Archives : all posts by Sean

Viking Moses - "I Will Always Love You". Viking Moses knows he cannot sing this as light as Dolly Parton or as vigourous as Whitney Houston. So what's he got? He has the conspiracy of vinyl crackle, vague piano, an old electric guitar jack. He has his own cracking voice. I can imagine Moses sitting on the bus, rocked and swayed, listening to Dolly on his headphones & deciding that he must, must record this. Some feelings can only be expressed in a few particular phrases; some things need to be said over and over, while they still hurt. (Thanks, Tony.)

[buy the 7"]

Pavement - "At & T". 1. Right now my favourite musical moment in the universe is what happens in this song at 1:10 (listen), when Stephen Malkmus loses control of his crescendo, his grin, and his tongue. "Whenever," he sings, "whenever," he sings, then: "bababarababiba-whenever I feel fi-ine." When he finishes the line it's like the skier landing the jump; when he sings it, all slacker glossolalia, it's like he's throwing paint at a colouring-book with every splot landing between the lines. The goof that becomes a brag; the mistake that improves upon the original. "Bababarababiba" is about finding a new vocabulary for something you feel real strong. (All my favourite art does this.)

2. Pavement pairs:

poetry/party
scatting/skating
enchanted/slanted
prophecies/stuff that just sounds really good
i walk the plank for you/slip shag watching back

4. This song is about secrets, about how they don't matter. Open everything up wiiiiiiide, just let the whole world in. Risk the deepest things even when-n-n-n you're feeling "fine". Open up your stocking ... open up your hands: in this rose rogue's town we can split everything 50/50. We can share all that's hidden. Go ahead and let the light in. The world is random falls.

5. The next best part of the song is at 2:55, when we come back from some treacled interior world and hear such a scream! A scream of looseness, of freedom, of the un-in-hib-it-ed. The end of distorted ghosts, yo. (It's a scream that the Salty Pirates cover, faithfully, at 3:34 into "My Academic Beard". Their version is squeezed tight, sexually desperate, and totally inhibited.)

6. I know someone who, in honour of this song, buys a spritzer whenever he's in Manhattan. I wish I had thought of that. Alternative suggestions are welcomed - put 'em in the comments.

(Part iii in my slow century of falling in love with Pavement.) [buy]
---

Destination:Out has composed a wonderful post touching on Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton and the jazz trio Air, with the requisite nod to Michael Ondaatje. The wheeze and whirr of Air's "Buddy Bolden Blues" is reason alone to wake up this Thursday.

Woodpigeon - "Home As A Romanticized Concept Where Everyone Loves You Always And Forever". Mark Hamilton used to live in Scotland but is now back in Canada. So he's like the future version of me - I, who leave Edinburgh in 8 days, and who will return to the the land of frost & tulips in May. It's therefore fitting that we have here a song about home, home (ahem) as a romanticized concept where everyone loves you always and forever. And indeed that's what I hear in these four minutes: warmth and love, familiar spaces, forgotten harmonies, that place where you're adored and safe. Perhaps too safe, but for one song we'll let it slide. Woodpigeon hail from Calgary, a place I've never been, and they're a sprawling band. Sandro Perri sometimes plays with them. I've never played with them. But the song makes me wish for my own sprawl of singers, guitar-players, bell-players, brushed-drummers, lovers. My own wooden trunk to crawl into and which, as I lie with pine needles and lavender, finally at home, is set out to sea.

[MySpace / buy]

Jetplanes of Abraham - "Take the Cash". Jetplanes of Abraham feel strangely out-of-date. Maybe it's the guitar-tone, maybe it's the way the male voices mix, maybe it's the clever-biblical band-name, but something here recalls a particular strain of late-90s indie-emo - Jimmy Eat World's Clarity or fellow Ottawans Kepler. Some things are from this 21st C, post-Arcade Fire world: violin, high-hat, tom drum, multi-part yelling. But mostly this is a song without gimmicks - it's just boys with guitars, a girl with violin, all with optimism, and a song that runs faster than they can. And the second half is breathless, brilliant, idea after idea; friends bounding happily into opportunity.

[MySpace]

---

People might be tired of such things but Shane-at-Torturegarden's Best Songs of 2006 is amazing. The art alone is reason to visit. Yes, oh yes.

François Virot - "My Head is Blank". With a squeal, strum and thump that reminds me most-and-only of the Animal Collective, Virot shows that Lyon, France has as many cornfields as Brooklyn, and as many girls with cornflower eyes. Here's the sound of a basement temper tantrum, pop shaken crazed from a cheap acoustic guitar. In three minutes and eleven seconds he goes from madness to serenity, giving up on lunacy in favour of sweet contentment. "And-oh-uh-ooh-oo-ooooooh...", like all you need to stop from going mad is to notice the bluejays, bluebells, clouds.

(Mille mercis á Chryde.)

[MySpace]

The Giggles - "Alarm Clock, I Hate You". I was told yesterday that "Illinois is Indiana's Wales". Which makes Indiana the England of Illinois. And it makes The Giggles - who hail from Bloomington, IN - the Franz Ferdinand of Illinois. Or the britpop of the Shetland Islands or... I'm really not sure. I'm woozy. I was woken this morning by a part-kraken alarm clock and so it's with delight that this tune comes tumbling into my hands - a track that wants so much to be played fast that it hired a better drummer just for this reason. Someone to hit the high-hat so often that the floor pot-holes, someone to organise a hundred metronomes all around the studio. The Giggles do not reinvent the wheel but there's something really nice here: some fellows who love their favourite albums with all their hearts, who found a melody along the side of the road and try to give it all the credit it's due.

[website / MySpace]

---

So ballot-boxes are now open for the 2007 Weblog Awards long-list. Last year we were pretty astonished to make the final shortlist for Best Writing Of A Weblog. We have you to thank. This year the Best Music Blog category is back, but to be honest we don't stand a chance: there are bigger fish out there, many of whom have Sufjan Stevens glamour-shots. We encourage you very much to nominate our friends listed on the right, especially blogs like Marathonpacks, Shake Your Fist, Zoilus and Moistworks, which have had remarkable years, have never been nominated, and didn't make the PLUG nominations either. If you would like to vote for Said the Gramophone (and oh, we'd be flattered), please consider again voting for us in the Best Writing category. That is, if you like us.

I forgot to mention it at the time but at the end of November, Said the Gramophone celebrated it's third birthday since we started the mp3blog format. Leaps and bounds. Thanks to everyone who's helped us get this far.

It is my pleasure to today wish you a Happy 2007, a year of dazzle, razzle and tender kindnesses, and to do so by at last - at last! - sharing one of my favourite discoveries of 2006. Her name is Basia Bulat.

Basia is a singer-songwriter from London, Ontario, dwelling in Toronto, who recorded Oh My Darling with my friend Howard Bilerman at the Hotel2Tango in Montreal. A studio for Silver Mt Zions and Arcade Fires, home suddenly to her charging pop-folk. Rough Trade has snapped up her album for release outside North America, but she is still (bafflingly) in search of a label in Canada/USA.

A couple of months ago I voted on the most exciting Canadian acts of 2006, and Basia was #3 on my ballot, just behind Swan Lake and Destroyer. I wrote: "songs that clatter with all the clatter clatter clatter of a fine set of drums. And a voice like the moon, that time." And this is true. The moon, that time. (You know the time.) It's a voice that opens wide, wide, wide, something with tinges of Joni Mitchell, Leslie Feist or even Amália Rodrigues, and yet so unhidden in comparison - a voice that is above all exciting to listen to, with so much volleying through it. Like sticking your head into the thick of fireworks, of northern lights, feelings flashing full in your face.

And it's a pretty music, catchy and hot; and it's been sustaining me for months. And I guarantee that one of the songs below will be in my Best Songs of 2007.

Basia Bulat - "Snakes and Ladders". One of my favourite things about this album is the way the drums are played on songs like this. They hurtle at double-speed, ratatat-tat, chasing the singer breathless. So many female songwriters take-it-always-easy, languishing in slow piano chords and then the occasional strident bit. Here it's like the band (Basia, drums, strings) are throwing themselves down a hill, feet scarcely keeping up with their feelings, this close to tumbling head-over-heels into something. And indeed so it is: "It's the way we come undone / what a perfect accident / oh we danced around them all / like we didn't even notice / oh / at the way we'd come undone."

Basia Bulat - "The Pilgriming Vine". One of the last songs recorded in these sessions, and I like to imagine the musicians sitting there despondent, nothing quite catching, Christmas lights twinkling, when in through the door troops a marching band - bass-drum, cymbal, flute, string section, a guy with a piano balanced on his open palm. And suddenly they know exactly where the song's headed, where it ought to be headed, the path that leads from the girl and her acoustic guitar, hopes in hand, to the moment at 2:55 when with her voice doubled-up we hear every trembling angle of what she's (we're all) waiting for: "Tell me I'm always your Only," she sings. Down by the maypole. If you go.

(My suggestion to you, dear readers, on this January 1st: do go.)

[Basia Bulat's MySpace (replete with Strokes cover) is here, her homepage is here. Her album is due in March in the UK but she still seeks a label elsewhere. She plays The Drake Hotel in Toronto this Thursday, the day before my birthday.]

---

The final version of Herman Dune's "I Wish That I Could See You Soon" music video is now online. All sorts of things are invisible! I think I liked it better with goofy green men, though.

Just over a year ago, I "introduced" Uncle John & Whitelock, and this previous Saturday I stood in Glasgow and watched them play their final show.

They're not a famous band. Within Scotland they are infamous - murmured & shouted about within musical circles, frustration and revelation embodied by 5 young men in black. They started playing around the same time I arrived in Edinburgh, and stopped, now, just a few weeks before I leave. They were my favourite of the country's young bands - deep, vast, incomprehensible, vicious. It was a sound I had never heard before, something Old Testament and forsaken.

Their final gig was at King Tut's, a small room where we were packed tight. They played most of the songs from their (severely flawed) LP, There Is Nothing Else, an album that at 20 tracks discloses too much, and with a clean, almost anemic recording, discloses too little. And yet when played loud your body will catch a flicker of the things that shook the walls whenever they took the stage, the way their "horror r&b" and "dead soul" gave a clear face, fiery eyes, to the ambiguous here-and-there lostness of life in the 21st c. Uncle John & Whitelock's principal principle was: You will die. And they wrapped it in country waltz, blues chords, surf guitar. As James Lovatt cooed, bony grin on his face, before launching into "Baghdadi" for the second-last time: "Merry Christmas. May you all drown happily in your beds."

It was appropriate that a band ruminating often on resurrection was strongest in its final encore. Lovatt threw himself into the crowd and our fingertips, they held him up.

Uncle John & Whitelock - "Aleister Crowley". A song of warning, with low sharp notes and flat beaten drums. Lovatt intones Crowley's name like he's about to summon the black magician, to summon him here to tremble. There are guitars in the front, heaving and shrieking, and in the back of the mix things are simply breaking. Dreams, hopes, necks. Roofs collapsing in the heat.

Uncle John & Whitelock - "Dead Cheerful". A much lighter track; a suicide lovesong in 3/4 time. It's the stuff of Bonnie & Clyde, country soul and the allure of the soft smoky inevitable. The love-affair's born on the internet. "You sent me a jpeg of that beau-tiful face / A two-page diatribe on how you hated and despised the human race." As we drift in a carbon monoxide haze, something beautiful and sleepy, the band bid adieu on all of our be-halves. They need to end it before the sum comes up. "Give up the dog / give up that cat! / say bye-bye fare-thee-well to allll of that."

Mistah Kurtz - he dead.

Uncle John & Whitelock, RIP.

[MySpace]

(A note on race: Uncle John & Whitelock always had a baffling relationship with race, something my friends and I were never able to decode. There are many references to "white" and "black men", and one song, "2-Fiddy'", is sung entirely in a kind of patois - with lyrics about "drug" and "rape fantas[ies]". The band, needless to say, are a bunch of white English- and Scotsmen. It's delicate territory, and the band's occult and martial imagery doesn't help. Me, I think it's some naive artists trying to voice the injustices they see wrought on black americans, but it remains the most troubling aspect of their work, and something I hope one day to better understand.)

Photo by me, at the Hey You! festival I covered for Pitchfork in August.

Merry Christmas to all those who are so celebrating. & Happy Christmas if you live in the UK, because that's what they say instead.

I don't have any festive music for you today; just music for slow-moving afternoons, which is the way my Christmas usually passes. I hope somewhere out there there are some humbugs, jews and travellers in a similar boat: slide around the floors with me, socks on.

Shearwater - "If You Stay Sober". A lovely lop-sided song from Shearwater's first album, from the band's first winter. From when the narrator's me-and-you was an easy thing, able to wash away the memory of dark times: "two days in '95" when he "wanted to die". With swing of drums and guitar, Jonathan Meiburg singing like he's swaying from a star, then a fiddle to underline the heaven come to earth - the way joy does sometimes just appear. [buy]

Christine Fellows - "Paper Anniversary". Tomorrow will be a post about death so today let's let it be about love. (Easier said than done. But seriously, wait, let's stay in the parentheses; it's easier here. And on "Paper Anniversary", Christine makes true love sound simple as punch, no harder than piano keys struck-and-echoing, a wheezy out-of-key organ, a statement of the things that Simply Are: "There's no better time than the second time, of anything, with you." It's a song that jolts with sentiment strongly felt, that jumps with the gladness of a moment shared. It's a yay.

[buy])

---

Amy at Shake Your Fist's best songs of 2006 has lots of very great things.

RIP James Brown. [photo (c) diane arbus]

Sandro Perri - "Sky Histoire". Perri usually records as Polmo Polpo, making an electronic music from small organic sounds. On Sandro Perri Plays Polmo Polpo, Perri revisits some of these songs - reinterpreting them in more traditional form, often with vocals, and always in beautiful, sumptuous tones. "Sky Histoire" takes the seaside want of Perri's voice and drapes it in trombone, euphonium, bells, tom, fingers-on-guitarstring. It's a tremendously handsome piece, yearning and somehow glad, evoking the ends of Grizzly Bear songs or the middle of Mulatu Astatqe's Ethiopiques.

[buy from Constellation]

Virgil Shepard Walters - "Ghetto Blastin'". I hope by now you are familiar with the virtues of Dan Beirne, one of the two men who writes this blog with me. And so I hope you'll realise what a compliment it is when I say that if Dan Beirne had a theme-song, it would share the same lyrics as "Ghetto Blastin'". Yes. I'm not sure that the music would be the same: Dan's got less twang than this, more spiky electric guitar. But the words, oh the vocals - they're sharp as looks, bright as spurs, yellow as pinnies. "I'm the best but even if I wasn't I hit the street with my cousin, we'd fuckin' tear it up." It's a song of hip-hop swagger that's dressed in denim jacket, green cords; that takes shaker, guitar, violins, a voice that curls water-damaged at the edges. It's all in that voice, Mr Walters himself, singing the Dan Beirne themesong.

Someone once pointed out the way my heart is always creaking. That my heart always takes this verb: to creak. But Dan? "Ghetto Blastin'"? No creakin'. Their hearts do things mine are not so much in the habit of doing. They "clatter", they "gallop". The song apologises if your heart don't do that. Oh, to have a galloping heart! It's very rare for me, something felt on mountains, in fog, and at first touches. But not Virgil Shepard Walters, not Dan Beirne. They've got feelings that take loud, forceful sounds - these fiddles f'rinstance, fiddles that move in and up and in and up until they're too much to compete with, til Walters is yelling over them and is forced to fade out. "I'm sorry / that you're dyin' / Lord I'm sorry! / I'm still living / and I'm crushing you with my twenty-two inch rims!"

What's my theme-song? I am going to arbitrarily declare it Bonnie 'Prince' Billy's "New Partner" (original vsn), because this is my blog-post and I can do, hope, crave whatever I want.

(Thank you, thank you Michael.)

[MySpace (buy the album for $5!)]

---

Marathonpacks' end-of-year mixes are smooth as silk.

Marcello Carlin's been writing about his favourite albums/songs of 2006. Of any article on Joanna Newsom's Ys that I've read so far, he best articulates my own ambivalent feelings - even if I liked it more than he did. (And he contrasts it against [perhaps my favourite album in the world] Astral Weeks!). But what I enjoy most of all is that his favourite album was Broken Social Scene's Broken Social Scene (released in the UK in 2006). That record was one of my very favourites of last year, but at the time I felt like one of its only cheerleaders. (This year's equivalent, ladies and gents: Swan Lake.)